The Realities of AI Video Surveillance

AI is transforming video surveillance by enabling natural language queries on footage, as reported by the Financial Times. This technology allows for unlimited search capabilities, contrasting with older preset search tools, and is being used in contexts like Israel, Iran, and Russia.

The Financial Times has a good article https://archive.ph/s6mES on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia. I wrote about https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-mass-spying.html this sort of thing a few years ago, how AI enables mass spying in the way that computers and networks enabled mass surveillance. The interesting development in the article is that AI allows people to ask natural language questions about video footage to AIs—and AIs can answer them. In contrast with older tools restricted to a few dozen preset searches, these new tools allow an almost unlimited range of enquiries by enabling language-based searches on video...